Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to online content, and more specifically to combining online content from multiple online data sources.
Description of the Related Art
A web site may display information, such as a map, with annotations, such as descriptions of points of interest on the map. For example, on the Yahoo!® web site, a user can turn on a smart view feature, and the locations of points of interest such as ATM's and gas stations will be displayed as annotations on the map. The user can find restaurants by type. The annotations are included on the map when the map is generated for display in the user's web browser. That is, the annotations are provided by the same party as the map. However, the annotations do not appear on maps provided by other parties, such as maps provided by a second party's web site. These other maps may, however, include other information of interest to the user, such as annotations created by the second party. The annotations provided by the first party are not displayed on the map provided by the second party, because the second party does not have access to the first party's annotation data. However, the annotation data of both parties may be of interest to the user. Existing techniques for integrating the display of annotations from both parties onto a single map involve the use of programming interfaces provided by one party for access by the other. However, such programming interfaces are complicated and time-consuming to use, and require effort, in the form of programming or other configuration, on the part of at least one of the parties to integrate their information with the other party.
There are two common approaches to integrating a web site with content from other services or sites. In the explicit API developer model, a developer needs to do something, such as write computer code, to send data to or receive data from another web site. In the second approach, there is a link or button that a user can click to access a site or service. In that approach, users typically leave the original site when accessing the other site
Software applications can combine data from different web sites or online services, such as a map from one web site, and location descriptions from a different web site. There are drawbacks to such software applications, however. To meaningfully combine data from different web sites, i.e., to combine data based on the context or meaning of the data, the applications typically require programming effort, or are dependent on specific details of the web sites or online services. For example, a meaningful combination of the map and location description data mentioned above would be a map in which the location descriptions appear as labels on the map in their corresponding geographic locations. A software developer may develop a software application to interact with a web site using programming interfaces or tools provided by the web site publisher, The developer can use an Application Programming Interface (API) provided by the site publisher, which involves specific programming, or the developer can program using the specific format of data provided by the web site, e.g., by coding the format of the web site into the software, or by parsing a site map.
A television set top box may display information about video shown on the TV. If a user is watching a baseball game, and the set top box may overlays statistics about baseball players on top of the person. The overlay model provides for simultaneous display of multiple types of information.
Therefore it would be desirable to have a simple way to meaningfully combine data from multiple web sites, without requiring programming.